Neberhood Social App NextDoor is launching a new version of its service that he is calling “New NextDoor”. The app is adding local news, real-time alerts and an AI-powered feature called “Faaves” designed to discover local businesses and spots. Nextdoor has also updated its overall design to look more contemporary.
Launched 15 years ago, Nextdoor has long served as a popular platform for neighboring interactions, helping users to add things such as recommendations for plumber and suggestions for nearby places. But finally, its growth stopped and the engagement declined because the platform was connected to the post False news And Casteism,
Now, the company is looking to turn on things and attract its platform more useful, useful and more users on time and attract more users. With this redisine, the nextdoor is looking to increase the quality and quantity of local information on the platform, NEXTDOOR’s CEO and co-founder Nirav Tolia told Techcrunch.
To bring news on its platform, NextDoor has partnered with 3,500 local publications in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Notable outlets include San Francisco Standard, The London Standard and Toronto Star.
Tolia said, “The reason for this is that it is very important for us, historically, Nexador has rely on the user-borne materials on 100%, just the material created by your neighbors,” Tolia said. “It has been a great source of information. But, to really, to ensure whether it is happening in your neighborhood, we need to bring local news too. So this is the first time we are allowing third party publishers to use our distribution.”
Tolia said that these are not commercial agreements, as Nextdoor is not paying for materials, nor publishers are paying to the company. Additionally, nextdoor is not hosting the material; It is only a title, a snipet, and an image displaying, and directing the traffic to the publications. The users will be able to discuss the news in an comment section under each post.
Tolia stated that the publisher Nextdoor has the first new types of materials to come, as the platform has also planned to allow small businesses, schools and organizations for native appearance in future apps.
In terms of new alerts, NextDoor now shows real -time updates on things such as weather, traffic, power outage, storm and wildfire. These alerts will appear on the map of a dynamic neighborhood, allowing neighbors to interact at timely about safety and preparations.
The service is partnered with Samdesk and CALED.com, including Weather Channel App and Weather.comTo give strength to these alerts.
“When something happens that is certainly worth noting, we call that yellow kingdom, and we will put that alert right on top,” Tolia said. “When something is important, we say the Red State and it will handle the entire app, because at the point you do not care about the conversation that neighbors are telling about pickles. You really do not care about reviewing the new restaurant that local publishers helped to save each other in some cases with their neighbors.”
Tolia said that these alerts are hyper-localized as Nextdoor is built on a geophysical platform. So unlike Amber alert, which are sent to all to a certain location, Nexador says it can personalize its alert for the house. For example, if there is a power outage, the app will only send an alert to those whose power is out.
For the launch of the fountains, Tolia says that the recommendations of the neighbors are more valuable than going to Google or Chatgpt when looking to find a place to spend time with a local restaurant or family in weekends, which is why NextDoor is launching the NextDoor feature. The new Favels features the curated list of features recommendations, and lets you ask specific questions to receive suggestions.
Tolia said, “We have an LLM for every neighborhood where we have a 15 -year -old conversation and now we can answer questions about that information.” “So we have the first, as far as we know, the first is true AI which is operated by neighboring conversations.”
You can ask the question, “What is the best place to increase with children?” And get a quick, abbreviation response that draws information from the post of real users on NextDor. Under the summary, you can see and click on the posts that the summary is referring to.
“This material is owned to Nextdoor,” Tolia said. “We have never shared it. It is not sequential by Google. It is not available on Chatgpt, and again, because we know where you live, we can target the information in the most relevant way.”
Tolia stated that the unique value of Nextdoor is in digitizing and capturing the local word-off-mouth, the kind of hyperlocal information that is not available through platforms such as Google or Chatgpt, as you can get it only from direct conversations.
“I give a fun example of this, if you all want to know about lemonade that children are working in your neighborhood, you can’t go to Google Maps and find it,” Tolia said. “You can’t go to chat and ask that question, okay? You are the only way for you to ask your neighbors. And so what is about Nexador. So what are we going to do? So we are really going to advise to make this feel a hyperlokal. It is really important for us to be seen as a social network.
